10 books to read this May

[Dr Frook]

Yep... for all u big brains out there, here is a list. String theory is the only thing that appeals to me... really.


Louise Erdrich, LaRose
Native American author Louise Erdrich’s multi-generational North Dakota chronicles have won a string of awards, including the US National Book Award for The Round House. LaRose begins in the late summer of 1999, as Landreaux Iron tracks a deer on the reservation boundary next to Pete Ravich’s property. After he takes his shot, he is horrified to discover he has killed Ravich’s five-year-old son Dusty. Taking an ancient approach to atonement, he and his wife Emmaline offer up their own son, LaRose. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell Ravich and his wife Nola. Erdrich embeds the ongoing repercussions of this tragedy within a shimmering, time-shifting narrative that begins with the first LaRose in a line of family healers that goes back 100 years, and gives glimpses of those who came after. (“All of them learned two languages…the uses of plants, and to fly above the earth.”). Erdrich is a peerless storyteller, writing here at her peak. (Credit: Harper)

Herta Müller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
This newly translated 1992 novel from the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, set during the twilight of Romania’s Ceausescu regime, makes vivid the persecution Müller and others suffered. (She emigrated in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.) Adina, a teacher, a musician named Paul and lovers Clara and Pavel seem to be close friends. But one is an informer, reporting to the secret police. When Adina finds the tail razored off her fox fur rug, and later a foreleg, she knows someone has been in her apartment and that she is being watched. “The breath of fear looms in the park, it slows the mind and makes people see their lives in everything others say and do,” Müller writes. She uses the distinctive language honoured by the Nobel Committee for its “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" to give a powerful sense of the toxic atmosphere of a totalitarian regime, where the dictator’s eye “stares out of the newspaper every day, peering into the country.” (Credit: Metropolitan)

CE Morgan, The Sport of Kings
Morgan, who has won Whiting and Windham-Campbell awards, incorporates several centuries of US history into this ambitious and epic tale of a racehorse bred to win the Triple Crown of elite US thoroughbred contests. The Forge clan has lived at Forge Run Farm in Kentucky for seven generations, ever since Samuel Forge came through the Cumberland Gap from Virginia with a slave and a Naragansett Pacer he’d raised from a colt. By the 21st Century, hard-bitten Henry Forge and his daughter Henrietta focus their dreams on Hellsmouth, a filly who is almost perfect. Allmon Shaughnessey, a young black man whose gift for working with thoroughbreds is discovered while he is in prison as a teenager, is hired to help them train the horse. Morgan’s language is hypnotic and her scope Faulknerian as she immerses us in the stories of these three characters, and the legacies and passions that overwhelm them. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Geoff Dyer, White Sands
Dyer is a masterful cultural critic, winner of the EM Forster Award, a US National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and a 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize. In this collection about places he has visited, he searches for traces of Gauguin in Tahiti, visits a glitzy rooftop bar in Beijing with a seductive tour guide, and makes field trips in Los Angeles to the Watts Towers and the former home of Theodor Adorno. These are interspersed with passages about his boyhood in the English spa town of Cheltenham. In the title story, he and his wife pick up a hitchhiker. Then they drive past a sign that says "Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers/Detention Facilities in Area." The car goes silent. “We had all seen the sign, and the sign had changed our relationship totally,” he writes. His fluid and surprising imaginative shifts keep these essays endlessly engaging. (Credit: Pantheon)

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
Haslett’s second novel is a potent tale of love and loss. Margaret graduates from the prestigious Smith College in the 1960s, moves to London and marries British-born John, whose mind, she discovers during their engagement, “goes into a sort of hibernation” from time to time, requiring his hospitalisation. Imagine Me Gone follows the arc of their marriage, and explores how John’s eventual suicide affects each member of the family over several decades. Alec, their youngest son, becomes a control freak, Celia, the middle child, is the responsible one, and Michael, the eldest, who seems to have inherited the mental illness his father calls “the beast,” alternates between parody and despair, with occasional moments of bliss. By its heart-breaking conclusion, we’ve come to know intimately the joys and struggles of each member of this troubled family. (Credit: Little, Brown)

David Foster Wallace, String Theory
Literary legend Wallace grew up in Central Illinois, “Tornado Alley,” as he calls it, where life is “informed and deformed by wind.” He was, between the ages of 12 and 15, a “near great” junior tennis player, having honed his game by adopting a “weird robotic detachment” from the “unfairnesses of wind and weather.” He later thought of himself as “a long-time rabid fan.” “He loves the game but yearns to transcend it,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in his introduction to String Theory, which collects five passionate Wallace essays. His subjects: his junior tennis career, Tracy Austin’s “breathtakingly insipid autobiography”, democracy and commerce at the 1995 US Open, the little-known player Michael Joyce. A comment from his best-known piece, about tennis great Roger Federer and the “moments” he creates, could apply to Wallace himself: “Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious”. (Credit: Library of America)

Benjamin Wood, The Ecliptic
Scottish painter Elspeth Conroy takes the name ‘Knell’ when she arrives at Portmantle, an exclusive and secretive artists’ colony off the coast of Turkey. Ten years later she still is seeking a breakthrough. Her mates on the island include Quickman, whose first book made his reputation and left him blocked; a playwright who calls herself MacKinney; and Pettifer, an architect whose last commission is still unfinished. They are asked to help a newcomer adjust, but 17-year-old Fullerton’s hostility and strange behaviour are warning signals something is seriously amiss. Wood loops back to tell the story of the tragedies and betrayals that have shaped Elspeth’s artistic spirit, and the importance of the “ecliptic” – an imaginary circle outlining “the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun” – to her creative imagination. That’s just the beginning of the puzzles he sets forth and solves in this original and suspenseful novel. (Credit: Penguin)

Lauren Belfer, And After the Fire
In May 1945, after the Allies liberate Germany, Corporal Henry Sachs finds a folder of handwritten music in a deserted house on the outskirts of Weimar. The signature: JS Bach. Decades later, he commits suicide, leaving the manuscript to his niece Susanna. As she sets out to authenticate it, she and her advisors discover that the lost cantata is “grim, hideous and bleak,” based on anti-Semitic texts. Belfer balances her suspenseful contemporary story with a historic narrative based on real-life characters, including Sara Levy, a gifted harpsichordist who studied with Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. She hosted a Berlin musical salon that included Beethoven, Felix Mendelsohn and his composer sister Fanny Hensel, during a time when hatred for Jews was on the rise. This is finely written historical fiction layered with richly detailed characters and moral complexity. (Credit: Harper)

Claudia Roth Pierpont, American Rhapsody
Pierpont, a writer for the New Yorker and author of a biography of Philip Roth, captures 20th-Century American creative geniuses from Edith Wharton, F Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett through James Baldwin and Nina Simone, in a dozen sparkling, gracefully written profiles. Here’s George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, originally titled American Rhapsody: “the clarinet let out an uncorked whoop that riveted everyone in place before the wildly rising cry began to tumble, unmistakably laughing, down the scale. Nothing like it had been heard before.” And the Chrysler building: “The spire, a triumph of nerve as much as ingenuity and steel, was meant to take the city by surprise.” Pierpont writes about “ideals and ambition and alcohol and heartbreak and hard work and a great open expanse of country that promised everything even when delivering bloody intolerance.” (Credit: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Frances Stroh, Beer Money
The Stroh Brewing Company, founded in Detroit in 1850, fueled the United States’ largest private beer fortune. Frances Stroh was born into that family as its wealth was on the verge of collapse. With an artist’s eye for visual detail and an alert sense of her family’s denial and detachment, she describes her privileged childhood in Grosse Pointe, her older brother’s arrest for dealing cocaine, and her own experiments with drugs and alcohol in her teens. The family business loses 40% of its market share in a year, her parents split up, and she becomes determined to make her way as an artist, soon exhibiting in London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her frank and engrossing memoir captures the long decline of the city of Detroit and her sadly dysfunctional family. (Credit: Harper)

[Dr Frook]

and of course, I expect u to read them all. There will be a quiz.

[ObsidianTheGod]

I prefer comic books...
The dandy, The Beano... Denace the Menace!!!!!

[Archangel]

Read the book "Hush Hush"

[Rainshard]

The only books i'll be reading are text books so

[Flobalob]

The only books i'll be reading are text books so

CGP lyf

Not that I'm a massive reader, but if you're into Caesar/Genghis Khan (or just history in general) I can definitely recommend the Emperor and Conqueror series of books respectively by Conn Iggulden.

[JennyorAlice]

I've never heard of any of those. Of course, I read mostly fantasy, science fiction, horror, thriller and an occasional mystery.

[Demitri]

Agatha Christie all the way. Mystery and stuff

[Sylvia]

Great suggestions! The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is next on my list

[Rainshard]

The only books i'll be reading are text books so

CGP lyf

Not that I'm a massive reader, but if you're into Caesar/Genghis Khan (or just history in general) I can definitely recommend the Emperor and Conqueror series of books respectively by Conn Iggulden.

CGP is outdated you old prune